Thirty minutes later a panting, groaning, and profusely bleeding Jun would lie on his back, stare up into the void, and wonder if he was actually cut out for this whole cultivation thing after all.

Upon further reflection, it’d been a several fold lapse in his judgement that led to this unfortunate state of affairs.

The first and foremost being his willful disregard of the novel concept that, maybe, just maybe, there was a good reason the cultivation manual had been so gods damned expensive.

Presumably, anyone well positioned enough to afford such a text would also know how to use it responsibly. Perhaps even have the wherewithal to guide subsequent juniors along its convoluted, labyrinthine instructions, in a way that didn’t leave them a sobbing bloody wretch, writhing on the floor.

Apparently, two entire realms of cultivation weren’t something you could hop skip over, willy-nilly, just because you felt like it.

Jun, in all his arrogance and stupidity, had made the cardinal sin of thinking “more expensive equals better.” A philosophy that may have applied to, say, buying a new mattress, or, going out to eat, but most certainly did not apply to breathing manuals. He honestly wasn’t sure how he knew he’d gotten himself in way over his head. Though, perhaps the bloody tears tracking lines down his cheeks were a clue?

You know? He really couldn’t be sure.

It hadn’t just been that the breathing technique was extremely potent in its own right. He’d also somehow managed to screw up the sequence of steps.

Not only that, but, in a moment of pure genius, he’d had the brilliant idea to set up his spirit condenser almost immediately after purchasing it, not yet knowing what exactly it was, or what it did. This had all culminated in his first taste of cultivation ending with a terrible backlash, as the energies he was increasingly unable to hold onto slipped away from his control completely.

Said energies then proceeding to go on a thirty second rampage through his body, before they eventually slowed, and then dissipated completely.

He could only be thankful the chaotic energies hadn’t found his heart in their mad flight.

Yet again, praise be to small miracles.

After this humbling experience, Jun decided it might be best to stock up on a hefty sum of mending pills, just in case. If cultivation was going to be a daily occurrence, he’d need to be prepared for when things inevitably went wrong.

Despite his failures, he’d actually learned a lot from the experience. And while it was mostly what not to do, he felt that by acting upon the manuals instructions it’d actually helped him crystallize his understanding of the texts.

After convincing Ivory that he was well enough to continue—then convincing her that, yes, it was a thing worth doing, and, no, it was not yet another instance of hair brained foolishness meant to get himself killed from the inside this time, since the outside, apparently, hadn’t seemed to suffice—Jun retook the lotus position somewhat indignantly.

Picking up the breathing scroll, he once more ran his eyes over its contents.

According to the texts, the leaf on the winds breathing manual was a dual form breathing technique. This essentially meant that there were two paired breathing forms described—with each pair subdividing into two very distinct breathing states. States which both opposed and complimented one another respectively.

It was all very confusing.

There was both a passive, and an active state, though, since the active states were heavily tied to a set of martial forms, forms which the scroll hadn’t seen fit to include, he’d settled on mainly studying the passive states for each form.

The first was named the [Leaf Follows the Current] breathing form. Apparently, this form most closely resembled your typical method of cultivation, in so far as the scroll proclaimed. The form was first initiated by sitting just so, straightening one’s back and cupping one’s hands just beneath the navel.

Then, through a sequence of deep inhales, deep exhales, and brief exhales, one is meant to guide their breath to their dantian—a metaphysical point just above one’s navel—hold it there for a time, before releasing all the pent-up breath at once and beginning again.

As far as Jun could tell, this cycle was supposed to be repeated ad infinitum. A fact which had made very little sense to him at the time. Apart from his lungs feeling close to bursting, he hadn’t actually been aware of anything happening. It’d been around then that he made his first major mistake. He’d tried to skip steps.

Instead of repeating the boring, monotonous breaths until he could “feel the ambient energy that was all around him,” whatever that meant, he’d tried a different tactic.

Stolen story; please report.

I mean this just can’t be right, can it? Cultivation isn’t supposed to hurt, it’s just breathing. And breathing’s the most natural thing in the world.

And if it felt unnatural, he’d concluded, it must have been because he was doing something wrong. Seeing it as a misinterpretation of the texts on his end, he’d figured that if he simply tried everything in the text, one thing after the other—threw everything at the wall just to see what stuck—he might eventually stumble upon the proper way of doing things.

He was used to bumbling through multiple less than worthwhile iterations before he generated an idea or method worthy of implementing. He’d simply assumed that, if it worked in his everyday life, why wouldn’t it also work just as well here?

In a strange way, he supposed that it actually had. It was merely that the lesson had come at a steeper cost than he’d been expecting.

Right off the bat, the second form [Leaf Rides the Gale] had been a different beast entirely. If the first form had been a strenuous, though ultimately controllable process, the second form had been a possessive animal that outright refused to relinquish its hold on his breath until it said so, and was good and ready. Making him feel a lot like a leaf might in a gale. He supposed, in hindsight, it should’ve been fairly obvious.

And the worst part was, he did know better. In any other circumstance he would have been the first to preach the wisdom of reading the fine print before committing to anything. But the esoteric and often contradictory descriptions the breathing scroll gave him utterly confounded his detail-oriented mind.

If nothing else, that was another hard-earned lesson. And though he prayed there would come a time when straight forward answers and clear guidelines were the norm, he was already beginning to suspect that a lot of what cultivation was, had to be navigated more by feel than critical dissection.

With a sigh, Jun returned once more to the first section of the breathing manual.

He’d already turned off the spirit condenser, bringing the spirit density around him back down to manageable levels. With how little his body could currently hold, having more of the stuff around wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Sitting up straight, he began the first form once more. [Leaf Follows the Current].

Inhale for six heart beats, exhale for two, inhale for eight heart beats, exhale for three, deep breath in for another six, and then exhale for five, followed by another deep breath in for six.

This cycle then repeats.

Thankfully, now that he knew that the stretching sensation in his chest was only natural, it became a lot easier to fully commit himself to the exercise. It wasn’t as if he were an impatient person at heart. It was only that he liked to make sure his time was being spent productively. And never had that personal truth been more aligned with his circumstance than it was right now.

Soon Jun lost himself to the cycling of his breathing, and only when he felt he was ready, did he begin the visualization aspect of the first form. He first imagined an immobile leaf, located within a void at the center of his dantian.

Then, with every inhale he imagined the leaf shifting ever so slightly, just as, with every exhale, the leaf would be carried aloft on the current of his breath, before falling back down and going still once more.

The more breath he held in, the more forceful the current that picked up the leaf on the final exhale. And every time this cycle repeated itself, the tiniest of currents would remain in the void—tugging futilely at the mostly immobile leaf between breaths.

After enough time had passed like this, the strangest thing began to happen. The visualization seemed to take on a life of its own.

The scene proceeding of its own accord, without much need of input on his part.

As the cycling continued, for he didn’t know how long, the tiny currents left over in the void rapidly accumulated, becoming a light breeze which tugged the small leaf this way and that. And while the leaf was only moving in small, barely noticeable hops, it was a far cry from the initial stillness.

An unknowable amount of time elapsed like this, until Jun was yanked from his trance like state by the rumbling of his stomach.

Opening his eyes, he was surprised to find that it didn’t take him a moment to reorient himself. Despite the uncomfortable breathing exercises, not to mention the mental strain of maintaining the image for hours at a time, his mind felt unusually sharp and clear.

He understood immediately that the effects of the fasting pill must’ve run out, which meant he’d been cultivating for just under twenty-four hours now.

Your body has transcended its natural limits.

5 CELESTIAL ESSENCE CONSOLIDATED.

Your mind has transcended its natural limits.

5 CELESTIAL ESSENCE CONSOLIDATED.

Your spirit has transcended its natural limits.

5 CELESTIAL ESSENCE CONSOLIDATED.

Waving away the system messages and their unknown implications—kicking that proverbial stone down the road for future Jun to decipher—as he had done ever since they’d first begun to pop up periodically, he took a moment to let the fact of the matter fully sink in.

He’d barely noticed as time, apparently, flew by.

He briefly marveled over the simple ease of it all, before he downed another fasting pill with a few large pulls from his flask. Punctuality was key when taking these pills, he knew. Not only for the sake of assuaging his hunger, but also to maintain some semblance of time passing.

He had twelve fasting pills left, which meant he had a little less than twelve days before he needed to be above ground again. Hopefully in a position to enact the next part of his plan.

Having had his fill, Jun closed his eyes and envisioned his dantian. Using his mind's eye, he briefly caught the blurred form of what could’ve passed for a simple leaf, were it not for the way it streaked by like a restless woodland spirit.

Ceaseless, ever flowing, it was carried at speeds that tricked the inner eye momentarily. Looking on in evident pride, he watched as his tiny leaf friend rode the unrestrained fury of a natural disaster. And all the while his dantian practically thrummed with the power held within that storm.

Taking a good long look at all he’d accomplished; Jun couldn’t suppress a self-satisfied smile.

After a quiet moment spent watching the little leaf do its thing, he zeroed in his focus, allowed his face to go slack, and began to cultivate once more.